StacyIt's mellowed to "slush with a hint of ice" — rather like Jamie Oliver's taste in cocktails.

Hogsy Pogsy PooAnd
lo, those close to the ephemeral shrub snuffler did find themselves
perforated by her flying dire spines like cocktail sausages at a
convention for business executives who tortured flies as little boys...

Last night I tried mulled wine for the second time in my life. I think I
like my way better: throw in too much of every called-for spice and
sugar and heat in a coffee pot (great for preventing it from boiling).

I
suspect there are creative consultants out there being paid a hundred
grand a year for doing what most writers can do in their sleep. That
said, Feta does have to sell, I suppose, so sophisticated whipped semen
visuals are out.

Stacy

Last night I tried mulled wine for the second time in my life.

This sounds like a line from a dystopian futcha-novel where exotic festive drinks are outlawed like cocaine.

KerrieGlad
you spotted that one. Shame the same can't be said for its neck —
unless by 'well-modelled' you mean 'hilariously non-existent'.

maybe geniusAnd
a jolly good thing too. Rumour has it that commenting for the first
time here is marginally more exhilarating than having weasels texting
home down your trousers.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Regular blogging demands the stamina of an athlete, the resourcefulness of an astronaut, the creative spark of a Picasso locked in an iron trunk on the ocean bed by a Houdini — and no shortage of lies to pass off as truths.

But there’s something else too, something important.

To get the most out of today’s fast-paced HIP blogging scene, it’s necessary to have a decent pair of slippers in your armoury.

Why so?

In truth, the reasons are too numerous to list, and as the days pass, more come flooding from the woodwork like swarms of bees to a honey trap.

But here are my top five.

1) Burglar Attack Defence

With burglaries on the rise, and increasingly lethal weaponry making its way into every rogue’s swag bag or utility belt pocheterie, it pays to minimise your chances of being assaulted while deep in thought about a blog post relating to writing or motivation or the outpourings of an unreconstituted maniac.

Wear slippers, and you have a recipe for stealth.

Those rubber soles are especially sensitive to the depressed floorboards of a burglar’s creep, and serve as an alarm clock for any kind of robbery action.

As a bonus, they make for better silence in the ‘get the fuck outta here’ department than hob-nailed boots or skis.

2) Anti-typhoon Determination Boost

With the exception of Stephen King or Jilly Cooper, most writers will down tools upon being presented with a typhoon.

Too many talented writers have lost their lives as a result of over-exuberant shinnying, their final moments a bloody testament to the body’s inability to remain intact after a fall onto an unyielding surface. ..

With slipper rubber to slow their batpole descent, those writers could have made it through to jiggle again with the literary in the typhoon’s wake.

3) Cat Attraction Potential

Cats love slippers. Period.

Comma. Ellipse. Semicolon.

So when you’re stuck in mid-paragraph on a fiendish scifi-related blog post, hordes of kittens may descend upon you to rub their cutesy furriness against your feet and purr their contentment into your soul’s funnel like gin down the throat of an unrepentant widow.

People can get hurt, furniture risks being trashed, and it’s bad news for any kitten families sniffing around for slipper-clad softies.

Fact: even Bruce Lee would have been reduced to a harmless pansy if he’d made with the slippers instead of the nunchaku sticks. Kick anyone while wearing slippers, and your chances of inflicting bruises or rupturing organs are significantly lower than if you wore concrete clogs.

So when inspiration hits the blogging fan, protect yourself, your loved ones — and your world— by taking advantage of the safety bonuses inherent in slippers.

5) Instant Pig Cleansing Action

How many times have you sat at your blogging desk only to find your private space invaded by an unruly, filthy pig?

Snort. Snort. Snort. Oink. Oink. Honk.

Snuffle. Snuffle. Snuffle.

Fact: most slippers possess an unusually soft upper covering for the feet which makes a perfect cloth for wiping the crap off even the dirtiest pig.

Better still, by making rhythmic movements with a slipper just behind a pig’s ear, it’s possible to perform an act of animal taming on a par with the use of sedatives in care homes for the elderly.

What would otherwise be a disaster can be incorporated into your daily writing ritual.

Monday, July 20, 2015

No more procrastinating, no more endless cups of coffee — now you must hunker down and do the dirty deed.

In its way, this advice has merits.

If all you end up with is a blank page, at least you’ll have put in some effort.

And, as any seasoned procrastinator knows, over the course of a year,
the cost of all those anything-but-writing cups of coffee can stack up
to the equivalent of a small bungalow or performing llama troupe, so
watch out.

But “bum in seat” has a downside.

Somewhere in the hinterland between stiffness and collapse, a whole
new you is muscling on down as you work out, just as if you were pumping
iron and humping nylon at the gym.

Everyone from physiotherapists to ergonomists to crippled hunchbacks
chained to the walls of dungeons agrees: Writing can heck transform you
into a twisted monster and de-flexible your brain as part of the
package.

This is where the AbyssWinksBackAcrobaticLiberaceGibbonMethod can help you.

Typing was never supposed to be hacking, and that whole karate chop
routine is just another way of turning your shoulders into accessory
earrings.

So: deftess, please, ladies.

More specifically, the deftness of a fully blinged-up Liberace.

Liberace: Dr Jekyll to Edwina Currie’s Mr Hyde

Try it for size now.

With bum in seat and digits all twinkly and bouffant, as if tinkling
the ivories of the Queen of Kitschbitsch himself, try your hand at the
following paragraph, and note how light and airy you feel.

I’d intended to lift a random paragraph from a random
book here, but my Entropic Mallard du Jour plucked out American Psycho
and billtrilled its way to one of the many spinebending passages. So
here’s some Dr Seuss, modified to suit our theme for today:

Think and wonder. Wonder and think. Think all your thinkinessbeyond wonder’s brink.Spell it all out.Write it all down.Bum kissing seat.Liberace-ing on down.

Ok, so that’s the first part.

I was Liberace-ing all through that mock Seuss, but we’re still well
short of the ‘Whole Hog cops off with Full Monty’ deal we need to head
off the Harbingers of Couch Potato Physique Drudge.

So: cue acrobatic gibbons.

Oh, and also the Vision’s funky tangibility dimmer switch superpowers
much feared by villains from Ultron to Galactus to Wolverine’s stylist.

Ok, so while we wait for the gibbons to set up their trampolines to
either side of your writing desk, maybe you could rehearse your
Liberaces again.

It always pays to learn to walk before you can run, especially when
‘running’ in this case means withholding consent to Liberace at
precisely the moment when the flick-flacking gibbon acrobat spins past
and momentarily phases its arms with your own before assuming control of
your fingers.

Sounds weird, I know.

But that’s because it is.

So, get ready to type that mock Seuss one more time.

You’ll Liberace the first line as Gibbon Uno springs from his trampoline.

As the gibbon whirls over your head, he’ll drop his arms momentarily
into yours, and w-o-n-d-e-r-[space]-a-n-d-[space]-t-h-i-n-k-. his way
over to the other trampoline.

Meanwhile, Gibbon Twoono will be on her way from the other side,
ready to throw in the
t-h-i-n-k-[space]-a-l-l-[space]-y-o-u-r-[space]-t-h-i-n-k-i-n-e-s-s
part.

It’s nature’s way of cutting out the uninspiring hack hack hack hack hack and replacing it with a little Gib & Liberacified spring-phase-trill / spring-phase-trill / spring-phase-trill, the better to lend a flourish to your writing.

Throw in some maracas for your acrobats, and the spring-phase-trill hits a funky rhythm.

There’s no room for procrastination when your fingers have to mix with the beat.

Instead of skipping on writing, you’re just skipping, from letter to letter, word to word, spring to phase to trill.

Aaaaaaaaaand again…

Think and wonder.
Wonder and think.
Think all your thinkiness
beyond wonder’s brink.
Spell it all out.
Write it all down.
Bum kissing seat
to the Libgib Sound.

Hmmm, still not quite there — but as the gibbons set up more
trampolines and throw in spinning umbrellas (and juggled machetes), and
Liberace slips on his American flag hot pants, I feel more inclined to
skip some more and nail this awkward line.

What good reason is there to stop?

Right now, any excuse to fix coffee is an opportunity to pep down and vegetate.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

For a Time Lord who can have anything in the Universe, the Doctor spends an uncanny amount of time rummaging around in my wardrobe.

I’ve yet to wake up at dead of night to discover him in mid-rummage, but every clothes rail tells a story, and some mornings I’ve risen to the equivalent of a line of mathematical code hidden away in the subtle angling and spacing of my hangers.

The rascal wants my trousers — and I know it!

It’s my own fault, I suppose, for having the Grandad I had.

He was the one who bought me the 2nd Will Hartnell annual for Christmas when I was 3 because he thought I was a child prodigy — and, fool that I was, I read it.

There’s never been a time in my life when Doctor Who hasn’t been poncing around somewhere in the background, and though I know this is true for anyone unable to recall a world before student maintenance grants and Russia’s failed attempt at a global product pitch for throat linctus c/o that guy they blasted into space — and everything prior to these two historical cusps du yesterjour — it has been my privilege to hit the ground running on the Who deal.

Troughton and Pertwee fed my emerging brain in the years that followed my prodigeridooery of playful innocence.

With no Grandad around any more to make me feel smart, I had to rely on another deluded old weirdo.

Call me an optimist, but I’d like to think that when the terrorist hordes come crawling out of the woodwork, along with the racist thugs, unforgiving AI cyborgs, and faux-bearded Steve Jobs iFactotums, the settee stealth skills I picked up during those early years of Yeti, Sea Devil and Draconian will keep me safe from harm.

What’s important for me right now is how Tom Baker arrived on the scene around the same time I became interested in personal grooming.

(I will say no more for now about my teen fashion and hairdo exploits other than THANK FUCK FACEBOOK NEVER EXISTED BACK IN THE 70s.)

Since then, my wardrobe has danced a pas de d’oh with its counterpart on the Tardis, sometimes mirroring what’s on the honeycomb catwalk, sometimes foreshadowing the next look by dint of the Unimmaculate Dress Sense Gene shared by all who have far more important things to be doing than worrying about nails and lashes — with the exception of Ecclestone’s leather jacket and John Hurt’s nasal tuskery, because they were just stupid.

For posterity’s sake (and also as a permanent sticky note WARNING, crossbow bolted to cranium), most of my Colin Baker era apparel is locked away in a trunk in the attic, never to be seen again (unless the racist thugs and AI cyborgs prove sufficiently determined to render the settee plan a no-hoper), so my wardrobe has a less eccentric feel than it's had in the past.

But I’m still no Gap or Nike guy.

I eschew such vile abundance of trash, and will not walk amongst men as an advertisment for the clothes I don.

And now that the Beeb has released the trailer for Who Series 9, and I’ve beheld with my own first hand eyes the vision of Peter Capaldi bounding his 6' 5" deliciousness of Scot through the anticipatoscape in a pair of quasi-tartan spectaculars, I realise it’s time to chain my new trousers down and crack out the ethereal Ray Winstone border patrol before Who whisks over to the upstairs bedroom of Whirl Towers and rustles the fuckers like a space cowboy making off with a zillion carat space mule d’Or.

I have Royal Blue pinstripes — velvety — with neat turn-ups complementing an overall ramshackleness blending the flappiest best of Monty Don’s gardening trews with Dr Seuss’ most animated pantsywhimsy.

Working their magic in conjunction with my Whirl socks and my Docs, my miracle trousers more than make up for Son of Whirl LOSING my writing cape, and will forevermore serve to anaesthetise my desire to spend thousands on Billabong kaboodle, or some other pile of crap.

Monday, July 13, 2015

A gay hat worn up top alongside a sturdy Aboriginal funk pipe slung from the lip!

Two strawberries plopped into a bowl of cream with a sprig of Rosemary and a single rat hair!

How I met Your Mother on the TV, a cold caller from Peru on the
mobey, and Gymnastic Butt Hoes III streamed from the laptop to a pair of
white nylon curtains via a 1960s cine projector!

It’s what life is made for — an occasionally, what life is made from.

But of all life’s throbtastically idiosyncratic duos, my favourite of the moment has to be Boulderneck Fungpants & The Nipplegrizzler.

They’re out on the street, they’re in yer face, they’re up their own celestial crack.

So let’s take them singularly, before we figure the dynamics of…a duo made in gloopiest Downtown Brainpurée hell.

Boulderneck Fungpants He’s enormous. He stinks. His neck is like a section of some other
fat guy’s stomach, stuck between his own fat head and his fat, fat body
with ultra high yuck content lard.

His trackie bottoms are stained, his trackie top screams at the
seams, and he rumbles along, THUMMA-THUMM, like a dazed, telekinetic
bumble bee trapped inside a mountain who’s just trying to find its way
back to the hive.

He’s the Incredible Hulk with all the green whooshed into his armpits and groin.

He’s a colossus of animated pastry with the gait of an unballerina.

He is Boulderneck Fungpants, fatarse whiffbastard supreme, and from a
leather leash gripped tightly in his fist, he is tugged into oblivion
by…

The Nipplegrizzler It’s like the ferocity of a thousand wolves had been condensed into a
tiny hairball of a beast possessed of no other evident canine features
whatsoever.

Its legs are as oiled matchsticks dipped in a down-at-heel barber’s
floor as the very last octogenarian customer shuffles from the door,
nostril hairs clipped.

Its body is wiry and skeletal, like the cage of a shrunken wren, and
what remains of its drab and greasy fur pokes from every raised bone at
random with the plumage panache of a burnt gosling.

And it tugs on the leash — pant pant pant pant grrrr grrrr YAP!
— with the momentum of a giant asteroid hurtling through the cosmos
allied to the brain of a spazzy, jumpy Twat Monster loaded with max
power gazelle DNA.

It’s a raging scribble of petulant rage, mad to claw its way up your
body and sink its tiny teeth into your tits, and as it yaps and fizzes
on its leash, and Boulderneck Fungpants rumbles along making holes in
the pavement with his fatty stink, I’m minded to wonder whether there’s good news in the combinatorial after all.

What if Boulderneck Fungpants lands a job in my local supermarket?

Or, worse still, turns up on my doorstep, with The Nipplegrizzler
yapping and pissing its scraggy being all over my driveway, and says,
“I’m here to read your gas meter.”

?????

That would be a weird, weird combo too far.

Boulderneck Fungpants and The Nipplegrizzler, THUMMA THUMM and
yappity yap yapping their way through my ornamental spoonery to the
cupboard under the stairs where I store my Kilner jars of moth dust.

Then he’ll get down on his hands and knees like a stunned wrestler,
odours of all the dinners he’s shoved down his lardstomach neck in the
past week punching in clouds from the darkest stain on his trackie
bottoms, while The Nipplegrizzler snarls and chomps at my furniture,
spraying prunemucus more liberally and dangerously than ALIEN squirted
all that killer acid.

So I’m locking the door.

I’m giving up shopping.

I’m shacking up in my cellar for a week.

And when I re-emerge, I shall chase Boulderneck Fungpants and The
Nipplegrizzler down the street with a bazooka loaded with
disinfectant-filled balloons and scritty scratty dog stunning
cannonballs.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

In the fast food restaurant of internet hacks, the custard skin of neuroscience may be peeled from the apple pie of happenstance, and its soggy underside deciphered like Egyptian hieroglyphs.

There are hacks for everything, it seems.

Best time of the day to be productive?

Hack!

Top 3 strategies for beating habit?

Hack!

Solution to the conundrum for gaining maximum exposure for murdering people you believe to be infidels?

Hack!

Bit by bit, our tabs, phones and cybergimps are enabling one and all to take on board what would previously have been secret knowledge.

Like an inebriated magician giving the game away in his sleep, the internet has flipped the lid on everything from how to deal with your utility company like an FBI negotiator to better ways of honey glazing your Christmas dinner carrots while massaging a platypus into submission.

Advice, secrets, hacks — call it what you will: this pool of shortcuts and tricks ought to make the world spin a little easier.

But there’s a problem.

Let’s assume for a moment that time is infinite.

And let’s factor in a few ground rules to help things along, like ignoring any opportunities for the human race to be devoured by intergalactic space bugs or evolve into penguin-cum-chameleonalikes.

Shit like that.

Given time, it’s possible for everyone to figure out most of the hacks, same way as mathematics is now a part of everyone’s lives in the way it WASN’T when Neanderthals killed everything they saw at least ten times because they couldn’t count.

What if we ALL knew the best way to be productive? The top 100 habits for ANYTHING? The killer lines? The killer moves? The Ultimate Hairdo?

Would that really guarantee a world of easier spin about axis, where we productively all get along productively in a global Win:Win scenario to win over all other Win:Win scenarios ever Won:Won?

Or do some of these hacks depend on disabling “the other guy”?

As in, they’re not “hacks” but “shafts”?

Productivity is all well and good (ask any sloth too lazy to lick its own penis), but what matters in the end is what you’re being productive FOR, what objective is desired.

If one person’s hack is another’s amputated potential, then what is the product?

Monday, July 6, 2015

They say a change is as good as a rest — but it doesn’t have to be permanent.

So here I am, back on Blogger after nearly three months away on WordPress, settling into the old place again like a pendulum swinging itself back to stillness, an acrobat flipping himself into the upright after a succession of somersaults, a pizza solidifying in the fridge after filming on Mozzarella Titzenbelles IV got pulled for the day when Andy “The Teen Marrow” Tumesci twisted a testicle during the giraffe-skin boudoir scene.

It had allure, WordPress.

But it was not to be.

Most of the front ends I tested were less easy on the eye than Andy Tumesci’s strained expression in the moments following his encounter with the hilt of Daisy Cheesecake’s cutlass.

Ugly, boring, inattentive to any and all formatting instructions — and generally pleurgh.

(I offered this as a strapline to the guys at WordPress in exchange for something fancy, but they told me to fuck off and shoot myself in the head.)

Under the hood, WordPress is impossibler to use than the suction pipe on a Bosch handheld flea de-zitter.

From fancy menus capable of reducing Gordon Ramsay to tears, to disappearing tags and stats no genius savant could penetrate, WordPress rules the roost when it comes to sub-prepucular techcheese of a stinkily unpalatable nature.

(And, yes, the WordPress guys rejected that one also — but Apple have subsequently expressed an interest.)

Result?

It’s business as usual (insofar as usuality has any place anywhere on any of today’s popular internet channels).

I’ll leave AbyssWinksBack II up for a while to serve as cyberflotsam and cyberjetsam, and, busy bunny that I am right now, I’ll poach a few posts to reproduce here so I don’t have to write anything new every Monday and Thursday.

It will be like nothing had happened, nothing had changed.

As currencies plummet, radicalism rises, and Kim Kardashian’s monstrous gluteal array levels everything in sight, any change as good as a rest that turns out to be no change at all has to be a good thing...